On the sources of
presupposition
Mandy Simons
Department of Philosophy
Carnegie Mellon University
Two Foundational Questions
• What is presupposition?
• What is it a relation between?
• What is the nature of the relation?
• Is it always the same thing?
• Where does it come from?
• Conventional content of lexical items
• Inference driven by conversational norms
• Non-linguistic conventions
2
A third question
• How do the questions impact on one
another?
• Not all possible combinations of answers are
possible.
3
The phenomenon
• We identify presuppositions of
sentences/utterances using the “P-family”
test of Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet
1990/2000:
• Presuppositions are propositions which tend to
“escape” the scope of entailment cancelling
operators (negation, modals), and thus are
typically implied by (utterance of) any member
of the “P-family”.
4
Presuppositions as conventional content
• Conventional is what could have been otherwise.
• Conventional content is lexically specified. It
cannot be derived from any underlying principles.
• “In some cases, one may just have to write
presupposition constraints into the dictionary entry for a
particular word.” (Stalnaker 1974)
• The specification of presuppositional content will
depend on your answer to the “what it is”
question.
5
Example 1: Presupposition as condition on truth
value.
• [[know]] is a partial function from worlds
w to individual-proposition pairs <x,p>,
such that for any w:
[[know]](w) = {<x,p>: x knows that p},
if p(w)=1;
otherwise
[[know]](w) = undefined.
6
Example 2: Presupposition as condition on
dynamic update
• c+x know that p = c [[x know that p]], if c
entails p;
otherwise, undefined.
7
Example 3: Presupposition as content: Karttunen
and Peters 1979
• For each lexical item, specify
independently:
• Truth conditional content
• Presuppositional content (conventional
implicature)
• Specify “inheritance properties” of
particular constructions and connectives.
8
Pros and Cons
• Pros
• Nice and easy: specify the presup and you’re
done!
• Except: Presuppositions of clefts (it- or wh-): If you
don’t think these are linguistic units, you can’t talk
about their conventional content.
• Apparent attachment of presuppositions to
atomic clauses is explained; natural accounts
of presupposition projection become available.
9
Cons: Appearances of non-conventionality
• The conventional-property account fails to explain
certain regularities of presuppositional behavior.
• Presuppositions show a number of standard
properties of conversationally-generated
inferences: defeasible inferences based on
conversational norms.
10
Argument #1: Regularity
• All referential expressions have existence
presuppositions (identified by P-family
test).
• All change of state predicates have “startstate-held” presuppositions:
• Jane left/didn’t leave the house.
• The painting fell/didn’t fall off the wall.
• Jane became/didn’t become a US citizen.
11
The issue
• Explanatoriness of the theory: Stipulating
presupposition as part of conventional
content of each member of these sets
misses a generalization.
• Fails to explain why we don’t find
members of these classes with different
patterns of presupposition:
• e.g.: Why not stop which presupposes start
state, and one stop which presupposes end
state?
12
More evidence
• New words:
• New change of state predicates have standard
presupposition.
• Cross-linguistic
• Across languages, expressions which have the
same truth conditional content seem to have
the same presuppositions. (Anecdotal
evidence; Levinson and Annamalai 1992 on
English and Tamil; but see also Matthewson
2005)
13
Argument #2: Relation to truth conditional
content
• Presuppositions of a sentence are always
entailments of atomic member of the Pfamily.
• Jane left the house.
• Entails that Jane was in the house prior to event
time.
• Exception: anaphoric presuppositions e.g. of
too.
• Presups-as-conventional doesn’t explain
why two types of content should be
related.
14
Response:
• Presupposition is attached to abstract
representation which is shared by all
members of the class:
• E.g. Start-state-holds presupposition attached
to change-of-state event schema (Rappaport
Hovav and Levin 1998)
• But it seems implausible that all of these
classes have such abstract representations
associated with them.
15
Argument #3: Conversational properties of
presupposition
• Conversationally generated inferences are
inferences based on:
• Linguistic content of utterance
• Presumption that speaker intends to follow
conversational norms (Cooperative Principle)
• Knowledge of these norms (First rough
approximation: Quality, Quantity, Relation,
Manner)
• Presuppositions share hallmarks of such
inferences
16
Cancellability: Cancellation under ignorance
• Implicature:
• [To a waiter]: I’m waiting for a friend.
• [About another diner]: Maybe he’s waiting for
a friend.
• Presupposition:
• [About a sad-looking lone diner]: Maybe his
dog died.
• Generalization: Presuppositions
inconsistent with what is known about
speaker’s knowledge are cancelled.
17
More cancellation: cancellation under irrelevance
• Implicature example:
• Some of Bill’s students might be interested.
• Presupposition example:
• I’m sorry, I’m no use for your experiment. I
haven’t stopped smoking.
18
Two points
• Susceptibility of presuppositional
inferences to discourse context
reminiscent of conversational inference.
• Cancellation of this sort is hard for
conventional accounts, which entail that
presupposition is always present. (Has to
be dealt with by local accommodation.)
19
Nondetachability
A: Do you want to go to the movies?
B: I have some work to do.
B’: I have to work.
B’’:I have to get some work done.
B’’’: I have some stuff to do.
• Inference is nondetachable from the content
expressed; no particular form is required.
20
Nondetachability of presuppositions
1. Jane didn’t stop/quit/cease laughing.
2. Jane didn’t leave/exit/go out of/depart
from the house.
3. Jane realized/learned that/became aware
that she had failed her drivers test.
Conclusion: Presuppositions are typically
generated by expression of particular
content, not by particular forms.
21
Summary
• A fully explanatory account of
presupposition should explain where
presuppositions come from.
• Evidence suggests that at least some
presuppositions (perhaps most) arise
through conversational inference.
22
Stalnaker 1974 again
“I conjectured [in this paper] that one can
explain many presupposition constraints in
terms of general conversational rules
without building anything about
presuppositions into the meanings of
particular words or constructions.”
23
Other advocates of an inferential approach to
presupposition
• Jay Atlas (Atlas 1977, 1979 and
elsewhere)
• Boër and Lycan 1976
• Grice 1981
• Stephen Levinson (Atlas and Levinson
1981, Levinson 1983)
• Deidre Wilson (Wilson 1974)
24
But not everyone is convinced
“Stalnaker holds out some hope that
pragmatic presuppositions do not need to
be traced back to hardwired encoding in
the sentence meaning of natural language
sentences. The vision is that they might
rather be derivable from presuppositionfree sentence meanings together with
simple pragmatic principles…I am very
skeptical that any such story can succeed”
(von Fintel)
25
Abbott’s view?
• von Fintel reads Abbott as equally
skeptical about non-conventional account
of presupposition.
• Abbott in a nutshell:
1. Assertoric utterances typically express
multiple propositions.
2. Only one of these can be the main point.
3. Main point can be indicated by linguistic
features.
 Presuppositions are non-main point
propositions.
26
Abbott’s view?
• Her view involves an interaction between
the inferential and the conventional.
• But the conventional part is not
conventional encoding of presuppositions,
but of (something like) main point vs.
non-main point material.
• Where main point is not grammatically
encoded, I think Abbott is committed to
an inferential source for presupposition.
27
Abbott’s view?
• Good news: We can hash this out over the
weekend!
28
Review so far
• Raised the question: what are the sources of
presupposition.
• Standard view: Presuppositions are “hardwired”
into the conventional content of particular
expressions.
• This view doesn’t commit one to any particular view of
what presuppositions are.
• But would speaker beliefs be conventionally constrained?
• Considerations against the conventional-content
view, and in favor of conversational inference
view.
• I haven’t given you any account of how presuppositions
may be inferentially derived. To do this, we must first
commit to a view of what presuppositions are.
29
Strawson (1950) on existence presuppositions
• Attributes the existence and uniqueness
presuppositions of definite NPs (and other
referring expressions) to conventions governing
their use.
“…the fulfillment of more or less precisely stateable
contextual conditions is conventionally…required
for the correct referring use of expressions”
• Conventional requirements arise from the nature
of the act of referring, not by being “hardwired”
into the semantics of the expression.
• Not clear that “conventional” here means “could have
been otherwise.”
30
Next
• Some clarifications:
•
•
•
•
Inferring content vs. inferring status
Presupposition vs. implicature
Semantic vs. pragmatic presupposition
Semantic vs. speaker presupposition
31
Deriving content vs. deriving status
1. Jane left the house.
2. Presupposition: Jane was in the house.
• Entails that Jane was in the house: no
explanation needed for how this is conveyed.
• Explanation needed for why this has
presuppositional status.
• Standard (dynamic) assumption: This is lexically
encoded.
• My assumption: Explanation will involve
conversational norms.
32
Deriving content vs. deriving status
1. Jane didn’t leave the house.
• NOT entailed that Jane was in the house: so
we need to explain both that this proposition
is conveyed; and that it has presuppositional
status.
• Dynamic view explains both via the claim that
the non-negated sentence bears conventional
presupposition (plus dynamics of negation).
• Conversationalists must in this case provide a
conversational account of both facts: but they
can be presumed to be related.
33
Presupposition vs. implicature
• Saying that presuppositions are
conversationally derived is not the same
as saying that they are implicatures.
• Although some conversationalists do say this.
• Implicatures are part of what speaker
means (Grice 1957).
• Presuppositions need not be, and usually
are not.
34
Presupposition vs. implicature
• What the speaker means ≈ propositions
with respect to which she has a
communicative intention.
• Communicative intention with respect to p
(assertoric) ≈ an intention to get
addressee to believe p.
35
Presupposition vs. implicature
A: Are you coming to the workshop?
B: I’m not sure. I might have to take my cat to
the vet.
• B conveys that she has a cat, and knows this.
• But she has no distinct communicative intention
relative to this proposition. It is not part of what
she means.
• Hence, although B’s utterance presupposes that
she has a cat, B does not implicate this.
• But same kind of inferential strategies may be involved.
36
Semantic vs. pragmatic presupposition
• Semantics vs. pragmatics
• Distinction #1: between truth conditional content
and other types of encoded restrictions (e.g.
usage restrictions)
• Distinction #2: between conventional content and
what can be inferred on the basis of general
conversational principles.
• Distinction #3: between what pertains to
sentences/utterances, and what pertains to
speakers.
37
Semantic vs. pragmatic presupposition
• Stalnaker 1974: Called his account a pragmatic
account of presupposition, using Distinction #1.
• His account is pragmatic in the sense that he
does not take presupposition to involve
conditions on truth values.
• It is not pragmatic in the sense of distinction #2.
• No commitment to presupposition being uniformly
conversationally derivable
• although Stalnaker leans in that direction.
38
Semantic vs. speaker presupposition
• Distinction is made in the framework of the
“constraints on context” (common ground) view
of presupposition.
• Semantic presupposition: common ground
constraints on the meaningfulness of a sentence
or utterance.
• Pragmatic / speaker presupposition: speaker
beliefs about the common ground.
• A speaker is presumed to believe that semantic
presuppositions are satisfied.
• In addition, utterances may indicate additional speaker
beliefs about the common ground. Additional speaker
presuppositions may be identified inferentially.
39
Semantic vs. speaker presupposition
• Semantic presuppositions are constraints on the
actual common ground; speaker presuppositions
are (constraints on) speaker beliefs about the
common ground.
• Cf. Gauker 1998: Distinction between external
and internal norms:
• External norm: tells us something about what a speaker
should think or do given that the world is in fact a
certain way.
• Internal norm: tells us something about what a speaker
should think or do given that he or she has certain
beliefs and desires.
40
Semantic vs. speaker presupposition
• To maintain Stalnaker’s agnosticism about
sources of presupposition, we would have to
allow that semantic presuppositions (i.e.
constraints on the actual common ground) can
have either a conventional or a conversational
source.
• In fact, most common-ground theorists are not
agnostic. Assumption:
• Semantic presup = conventional
• Speaker presup = inferential (pragmatic)
41
Semantic vs. speaker presuppositions
• To insist on the distinction between
semantic presupposition and speaker
presupposition is to beg the question as to
the sources of presupposition.
42